Pollster Joel Benenson and his colleagues

G. Paul Burnett / The New York Times / Redux

They never leaked and rarely talked on the record, even while they spent vast sums on reams of data from polls and focus groups that guided many of the shrewd decisions the campaign made from the first days to the very end. They used the latest sophisticated techniques, married with old-fashioned political common sense to do what good pollsters do in a winning campaign: find the right language to explain what the candidate already believes, and target vulnerabilities in the opposition to destroy them.